What a
pitiful, what a sorry thing to have said that animals are machines
bereft of understanding and feeling, which perform their
operations always in the same way, which learn nothing, perfect
nothing, etc.!

What! that
bird which makes its nest in a semi-circle when it is attaching it
to a wall, which builds it in a quarter circle when it is in an
angle, in a circle upon a tree; that bird acts always in the same
way? That hunting-dog which you have disclined for three months,
does it not know more at the end of this time than it knew before
your lessons? Does the canary to which you teach a tune repeat it
at once? do you not spend a considerable time in teaching it? have
you not seen that it has made a mistake and that it corrects
itself?

Is it because
I speak to you, that you judge that I have feeling, memory, ideas?
Well, I do not speak to you; you see me going home looking
disconsolate, seeking a paper anxiously, opening the desk where I
remember having shut it, finding it, reading it joyfully. You
judge that I have experienced the feeling of distress and that of
pleasure, that I have memory and understanding.

Bring the
same judgment to bear on this dog which has lost its master, which
has sought him on every road with sorrowful cries, which enters
the house agitated, uneasy, which goes down the stairs, up the
stairs, from room to room, which at last finds in his study the
master it loves, and which shows him its joy by its cries of
delight, by its leaps, by its caresses.

Barbarians
seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so Prodigiously;
they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to
show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same organs
of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature
arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may
not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose
this impertinent contradiction in nature.

But the
schoolmasters ask what the soul of animals is? I do not understand
this question. A tree has the faculty of receiving in its fibres
its sap which circulates, of unfolding the buds of its leaves and
its fruit; will you ask what the soul of this tree is? it has
received these gifts; the animal has received those of feeling, of
memory, of a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these
gifts? who has given these faculties? He who has made the grass of
the fields to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate toward the
sun.

"Animals'
souls are substantial forms," said Aristotle, and after Aristotle,
the Arab school, and after the Arab school, the angelical school,
and after the angelical school, the Sorbonne, and after the
Sorbonne, nobody at all.

"Animals'
souls are material," cry other philosophers. These have not been
in any better fortune than the others. In vain have they been
asked what a material soul is; they have to admit that it is
matter which has sensation: but what has given it this sensation?
It is a material soul, that is to say that it is matter which
gives sensation to matter; they cannot issue from this circle.

Listen to
other brutes reasoning about the brutes; their soul is a spiritual
soul which dies with the body; but what proof have you of it? what
idea have you of this spiritual soul, which, in truth, has
feeling, memory, and its measure of ideas and ingenuity; but which
will never be able to know what a child of six knows? On what
ground do you imagine that this being, which is not body, dies
with the body? The greatest fools are those who have advanced that
this soul is neither body nor spirit. There is a fine system. By
spirit we can understand only some unknown thing which is not
body. Thus these gentlemen's system comes back to this, that the
animals' soul is a substance which is neither body nor something
which is not body.

Whence can
come so many contradictory errors? From the habit men have always
had of examining what a thing is, before knowing if it exists. The
clapper, the valve of a bellows, is called in French the "soul" of
a bellows. What is this soul? It is a name that I have given to
this valve which falls, lets air enter, rises again, and thrusts
it through a pipe, when I make the bellows move.

There is not
there a distinct soul in the machine: but what makes animals'
bellows move? I have already told you, what makes the stars move.
The philosopher who said, "Deus est anima brutorium," was
right; but he should go further.